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Twisted64 writes "If you're interested in voting below the line in the upcoming federal election in Australia, but don't want to waste time in the booth individually ranking up to 76 candidates (for the unfortunates in New South Wales), then Cameron McCormack's website may have what you need. The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example). Once preferences are set, the site can generate a PDF to be printed and taken to the booth." (More, below.)

"There's also something to educate the above-the-line voters — if you check the box for your single party of choice, the site will fill out the effective party preferences below the line. This shows that a vote for The Climate Sceptics hands first preferences to Family First, and so on.

The website claims not to harvest voting information, but for the paranoid it recommends printing out a blank ballot sheet and copying your preferences from the screen. There is also a button to set up a donkey vote when in the ballot view, in case you have trouble counting from 1 to 100."

I think the system is obviously pretty broken if the only choices are to number each of 84 boxes, go with a pre-decided list that the main parties have reached through secret preference deals, or have your vote rejected. At the moment you have to choose between two evils, and it has been made as inconvenient as possible for you to even make that choice rather than the party powerbrokers.

Group voting tickets are just undemocratic. Preferential voting should only go as far as the voter wants - if your vote doesn't get distributed to any of your preferences, it should be discarded.

This is why we have above/below the line voting. If you want to select only one, then you can do that. If you want to preference, then you can do that also.

I think preference voting is a very good compromise, but the voters need to be educated in it, rather than following blindly. Also, they need to know that if you make a mistake you can get a new ballot paper, and you can keep getting them until you are satisfied with your vote.

No, if you vote above the line, you're not selecting only one candidate, you're picking their pre-submitted preference list instead of your own. That's the main problem - the voters don't make the choice directly and the parties make deals or tactical decisions with their pre-submitted tickets. Slashdot's favourite Senator Stephen Conroy tried his luck at tactical voting in 2004 and accidentally elected a fundamentalist nutjob who got about 1% of the primary vote because they were trying to hold off a challenge from the Greens (when most Labor voters would have preferenced Greens first).

A preference system is better than a first-past-the-post system, but the current system isn't perfect. Most Australian states currently go with optional preferential voting, which should be the way to go.

No. If you fill out all boxes above the line you have voted incorrectly and the ballot will possibly not be counted depending on how badly you failed to follow simple instructions, the mood of scrutineers, the closeness of the ballot etc. In the best case the ballot will be treated as if only the "1" was present.
Voting - The Senate [aec.gov.au]

No. I'm a polling official (which is not the same thing as a "scrutineer"), and it most certainly does not come down to mood. If the voter's intention is clear, and it isn't disqualified for any other reason (e.g. writing which identifies the elector), then it's a valid vote.

The specific rules do change from election to election, and state elections have different rules from federal elections, but the basic idea is the same: If we can tell what you meant, it's usually a valid vote.

Yes. It's MUCH better for two parties to each select a candidate, then have everybody vote either A or B.

I heard it makes things go much better, particularly in Florida, where dead people and people with alzheimer's get to vote. It must be rather icky for poll workers when people who recently died show up.

Group voting tickets are just undemocratic. Preferential voting should only go as far as the voter wants - if your vote doesn't get distributed to any of your preferences, it should be discarded.

The net effect of which would be... letting others decide for you. The same as voting over the line, just in a slightly less predictable fashion. I don't get why it should make such an important difference?

I think the group voting tickets are interesting in their own right, for what they say of people's prefences.

Family First is a far-right "Christian" party, their only senator [wikipedia.org] is a self-confessed creationist, he became a vocal AGW "skeptic" after being fetted by US lobbyists such as the Hearland Institute and CEI. He is also a key proponent behind the intenet filter, at least he was until Conroy put his anti-abortion sponsers on the proposed blacklist.

Yup. And it appears that a small party that is ostensibly about equal custody rights (read: custody rights for fathers) is really mostly about this stuff. Sad. But important for anyone considering voting for them.

The net effect of which would be... letting others decide for you. The same as voting over the line, just in a slightly less predictable fashion. I don't get why it should make such an important difference?

It makes a difference because you can stop at exactly the point you want. To use an American example: optional preference voting would let you rank R, D, and Green candidates without having to care about where you're going to put the Constitution Party. Or a Norwegian one: optional preference voting

Here in Scotland we used STV [wikipedia.org] in our most recent local council elections, which is basically preference voting with multi-member wards. Although we were able to number all the candidates 1-n, we were under no obligation to do so - if you only wanted to vote for one candidate you could just put a 1 by their name and it would still be counted.

I only marked two candidates, because they were the only two (out of the eight or so on the list) that I had actually heard of.

Group voting tickets are just undemocratic. Preferential voting should only go as far as the voter wants - if your vote doesn't get distributed to any of your preferences, it should be discarded.

This has come up in the reviews that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters conducts. Usually someone makes the argument that optional preferential voting is tantamount to first-past-the-post voting, and the matter is more or less swept under the carpet unless and until it comes up again after the next

Group voting tickets are just undemocratic. Preferential voting should only go as far as the voter wants - if your vote doesn't get distributed to any of your preferences, it should be discarded.

Someone may have already said this (hey, why read all the comments if I haven't even bothered with TFA, this is/.), but I would like to see a system where you can number any number of boxes below the line that you like. If I only like three candidates, I only like three. I hate the bit every few years where I am sh

Only attendance is compulsory, you don't actually have to cast a valid ballot.

You don't even have to cast a ballot at all. I have refused to even take the ballot papers on more than one occasion. When the ballot papers are offered, I simply inform the scutineers that I have fulfilled my obligation merely by having my name crossed off the electoral roll - and walk out. They don't like it, but there's nothing they can do about it.

I have refused to even take the ballot papers on more than one occasion. When the ballot papers are offered, I simply inform the scutineers that I have fulfilled my obligation merely by having my name crossed off the electoral roll - and walk out. They don't like it, but there's nothing they can do about it.

Sure there something they could do about it. They could put you on trial for a criminal breach of s245 of the C'th Electoral Act, or (more

Where you people get this stuff from?! IAAL, so since we are talking matters of electoral law, 'technically' to me means you show me an Act of parliament of a curial decision rather than just making this stuff up. Allow me to demonstrate.

OR thus: Once you get your ballot paper you are required "without delay" to "retire alone to some unoccupied compartment of the booth, and there, in private, mark his or her vote on the ballot paper" (s233) [austlii.edu.au] [my emphasis]

So technically you must enrol, attend, collect your ballot, be marked off, and vote. Turning up and having your name marked off without collecting a ballot, spoiling your ballot, and all these other suggestions are technically illegal.

Not at all. Simply dust the paper for fingerprints and check to see if they're in any government databases. You can privately vote mark your ballot however you want. TECHNICALLY the law doesn't say your vote must remain private. Otherwise they could arrest and charge people for making it public who they voted for.

You're being silly, "in private" does not mean you can't reveal your vote, it means nobody else is allowed to snoop.

Put your thinking cap back on and re-read my post. The snippet in the OP is not the entire electrol act it's just one paragraph, as with all democractic governments, elections in Oz are by secret ballot and the law in Oz takes the privacy of the secret ballot very seriously (eg: see the recent kurffufle about blind people and their right to a secret ballot).

OK, so you are a lawyer. What is your area of expertise? A good friend of mine is a corporate lawyer who freely admits that he has nfi about criminal law and no interest in it, so does being a lawyer in one field automatically make you an expert in every field of law?

Yes, I realise that you have a sounder basis than "average joe" for making your statement, but I would like to be clear on exactly how much weight we should give to said statement.

[D]oes being a lawyer in one field automatically make you an expert in every field of law?

Not automatically, no.** Nor did I claim any expertise in electoral law. On the contrary, I refused to venture a definitive opinion on a matter on which I confessed I was "too lazy to do the research," (although I suspect I do know the answer). In fact I have no area of expertise since, despite the fact that I'm admitted, I actually develop software for a living. OTOH, a legal education ought to leave you with an

A good friend of mine is a corporate lawyer who freely admits that he has nfi about criminal law...

Your friend is lying to you!:) Assuming he is an Australian lawyer, we all have to study Criminal Law in first year, and to be frank, it ain't exactly rocket science (a criminal specialist might beg to differ). Moreover there are numerous criminal provisions in corporate law. OK, he's not a specialist, but NFI, yeah right!

The polling officials aren't actually scrutineers - scrutineers are representatives of political parties (generally volunteers) who are allowed to be present during the counting of the votes. Polling officials are usually casual employees who just show up and do the job. They probably couldn't care less about whether you took a ballot paper or not.

I used to do that job during university. It was a long day, but decent money (varied, but around $350 - $400 for a long day). The only reason I can think of not l

It's not illegal to cast an invalid vote (it just won't get counted), and the punishment for not turning up is only a fine.

Still, compulsory voting does compound the deficiencies in our system. Most people go with the easy way out because they see voting as a chore, most evident in the high proportion of donkey votes (that's where a voter just numbers the ballot 1,2,3,4... for our international readers).

Only if those people are donkey voting by accident. If I *choose* to donkey vote, I have fulfilled my public obligation to cast a vote, whilst satisfy my moral and personal obligation to lodge a protest against the system.

Can a donkey vote be cast by accident? It is usually taken to reflect a "dunno don't care" attitude to the process. OTOH if your preferred candidate is first and the least preferred last, numbering straight down the ticket isn't a 'donkey vote' at all. And it's not possible to separate these two cases on the basis of any single ballot alone. Indeed beyond observing that there is a statistical tendency for candidates on the top of the ticket to do bett

One is reminded of that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government...

The problem is that Churchill was a racist, biggoted prick. If he lived in our times, he could have been charged with war crimes ( though of course like current politicians who commit war crimes, there is little chance that this would actually happen ).

The government knows I'm not enrolled. The AEC has been sending me enrolment forms ever since I turned 17 (so for the past 5 years). I just put them in my 'filing cabinet' (i.e. rubbish bin.) Crime or not they don't seem to care about it, otherwise they would have fined me or something by now.

Live on the Northern Beaches? I did, used to live near Warringah (Which was the council that was tossed out, known to be heavily corrupt and enough to the residents whinged to state government to get them out), the funny thing was that the administrator that they put in was more effective than the local council. The administrator started effectively communicating with the local communinity by taking space in The Manly Daily and he (Or probably one of his administration) would write up a letter each week say

Compulsory voting is fantastic because it encourages a higher voter turn than voluntary schemes, and gives a better chance of actually getting what the public wants, rather than just what politically motivated groups want. Donkey votes are a minor problem, but at least such people can be seen to have willingly abstained, rather just failing to turn up.

I think it would be a complete disaster if Australia ever adopted a voluntary system like the US, where half the battle is just getting people to bother turni

OK that didn't take long. The site seems to be slashdotted already. Perhaps it wasn't a good idea for it to be serving 500KB @font-face referenced fonts from my little VPS.:)
Once everybody's stopped clicking the link, I'll try moving the static data over to something that can handle it, like an Amazon S3 bucket.

If you're really keen, then the list of candidates that the AEC publishes includes telephone numbers for all of them, and email addresses for many of them. In case you can't find any useful information online, you can always ask them their position on the issues you think are relevant.

"The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example)."

Non Australian voters might be confused by this article because it gives the impression that you need a HOWTO to be able to vote. But thats not true. Just give people you don't like high numbers, and people you do like low numbers. Its still pretty simple.

You can tell from my sig. Labour candidates are getting high numbers from me in the senate this year.

In the senate you're allowed three sequencing mistakes before you paper is thrown out.
Anthony Green's election guide [abc.net.au] is a pretty good starting point for those wanting to better understand our voting system. He also has pretty good guides of how much the voting has to swing for seats to change hands - Senate [abc.net.au] and House of Reps [abc.net.au]

What you are suggesting is pretty close to a "Langer Vote" (ie: number the guys you like from 1 to N, fill the remaining boxes wiht N+1). This is specifically legislated against in the commonwealth Electoral Act, 1998 amendments.

When voting "below the line", the numbers must start at 1, they must be consecutive, and all boxes must be numbered. If those simple rules are not followed, the vote is invalid. When voting "above the line" the voter just puts 1 for their preferred party, and the various preferences

Not sure what the deal is with belowtheline.cc (has it been/.ed already?)
But belowtheline.org.au is very telling.
It is telling me that a vote for democrats above the line will likely be a vote for liberal due to them being preferenced second place...
I think I'll do my own preferencing

They do. They're called "how to vote cards". As you walk into the polling booth you're handed bits of paper from people representing many of the major parties. They contain facsimiles of the ballot papers which have been filled in to their liking, allowing you to copy the vote your favourite party wants without thinking.

If Internet Censorship is your main concern this coming election, the following guide has been created online via BelowTheLine.org.au [belowtheline.org.au] and using the different parties websites and statements on policies to order them.

While they are ordered in preference of internet censorship, the top 2 are ordered based on their ability to influence. The rest are ordered within their preference (against/unknown/for) relatively randomly, except with the Australian Labour Party b

G is closer to 25% of Y; C is over 60%. If you don't understand what I've just said (and I expect you don't), you may wish to consider reading an introductory economics textbook before publicly demonstrating your ignorance.

It would be nice if you were right; but that's not what your link itself says.

If you vote both above and below, the below vote counts unless it's ruled informal - in other words, invalidly. In that case, what you voted above the line counts, instead of your entire vote being rejected.

So if you followed your own advice, and ranked say 40 of 81 below the line, and put green above it, the below-the-line part would be invalid, resulting in you casting a vanilla green vote.